All facts completely reducible to physics are first-order facts.
All facts completely explained by first-order facts are themselves completely reducible to first-order facts.
Facts about our epistemic reliability are facts about truth.
Facts about truth are not completely reducible to first-order facts.
Therefore, no complete explanation of our epistemic reliability is completely reducible to physics.
This is a variant on Plantinga’s evolutionary argument against naturalism.
Premise (4) follows from Tarski’s Indefinability of Truth Theorem.
The one premise in the argument that I am not confident of (2). But it sounds right.
Thanks Prof. Pruss for this thoughtful post. I am very interested in this issue.
ReplyDeleteMy simple way of stating your argument is: “There must be an explanation of the explanation.” When applying that criteria to materialistic naturalism, it will be found that naturalism falls apart.
“The laws of physics can explain everything!” But wait a minute. How do we know and properly apply the ultimate laws of physics? Isn’t the human species just a random branch on the evolutionary tree of life? How did ‘evolution’ produce the ability to acquire such accurate and in depth knowledge? Additionally, aren’t our mental states just produced by particles being directed by deterministic physical laws? Do the laws of physics give us knowledge of the laws of physics?
David Albert coined the term “cognitively unstable,” meaning that the more you scrutinize an argument, idea or assertion, the more implausible it becomes. I wonder if he has examined the cognitive stability of naturalism?